A fashionable doomsday scenario has been doing the rounds in Moscow for the past year as Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, struggles to impose an order of sorts on the legacy of chaos he inherited from Boris Yeltsin.

Despite television towers burning, submarines sinking, bombs in Moscow, war in the south, Russians were told they had not seen anything yet. Forget the millennium bug - look forward to the 2003 emergency. The "apocalypse ahead" punditry came from MPs, Kremlin officials, economists and sociologists.

Ordinary Russians could be forgiven for not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. For in 2003, they were told, various factors of economic, demographic and infrastructural decline would combine at critical mass to turn Russia into one big disaster zone.

Thus, exactly a year ago, Mikhail Delyagin, director of Moscow's Institute of Globalisation Problems, waxed profoundly pessimistic: ''Two negative effects will overlap in 2003. The first will be the peak of repayment on debts and the second, the depreciation of fixed assets, will reach a level beyond which lies the mass collapse of all life-support systems.

"The state has not stopped to ponder these problems yet. I don't see any acceptable prospects for Russia. We are heading for a liberal dictatorship, greater degradation of the population, the emigration of the healthy part of society and the inability to handle the 2003 crisis.''

Chilling stuff. But the long-suffering millions of Siberia and Russia's far east, shivering in the most severe winter for decades, could be forgiven for believing that 2003 has dawned two years early.

Temperatures in Siberia and the far east have dropped at times to lower than -60C (-76F) in recent weeks and temperatures of -40C (-40F) or -50C (-58F) have been common. But Russia's ramshackle and heavily corrupt electricity and energy sectors have failed to rise to the challenge, meaning that thousands of homes, factories and schools are going unheated in what is reckoned to be the worst winter since the second world war.

Protesters have been marching, blocking strategic roads around Vladivostok and complaining loudly while the politicians in Moscow and in the regions, and the managers of the electricity industry pass the buck and blame one another.

The world's biggest natural gas producer, its second biggest oil producer, a country that produces more coal than it consumes is this year unable to keep its citizens heated.

The problem is that the impact of years of neglect, corruption and lack of investment in the electricity infrastructure is coming home to roost and the system is breaking down. Anatoly Chubais, the free market zealot who heads the national electricity grid, is using the crisis to push for radical restructuring of the industry. Crooked regional leaders have been failing to lay in fuel supplies for the winter, siphoning off budget funds earmarked for electricity bills, then blaming Moscow for the suffering while diverting the money.

And the Kremlin seems to see the whole affair not so much as an energy crisis as a political opportunity. As a result, the Russian government suffered its first casualty under Mr Putin this week when Alexander Gavrin, the energy minister, was fired. But more significantly, the Kremlin also blackmailed the tyrannical far eastern governor, Yevgeniy Nazdratenko, into resigning.

From the start of the protests a couple of months ago, it was clear that Mr Putin would use the wretched state of affairs to make political capital. His regional envoy, Konstantin Pulikovsky, announced: ''This not an energy crisis, it's a crisis of political legitimacy.''

The Kremlin then started drawing up a dossier on the life and times of Mr Nazdratenko. Selective leaks began appearing in the press. Its full publication would have been unedifying. Then on the day Mr Nazdratenko was scheduled to make the long haul from Vladivostok to Moscow to discuss the crisis, he instead checked into hospital pleading heart trouble.

Mr Nazdratenko is notorious for his iron rule of the past seven years, regularly thumbing his nose at Moscow, snuffing out opposition locally, harassing the press and having his cronies take over local businesses. People opposing him have been bombed. Andrew Fox, a British honorary consul in the far east, fled the region 18 months ago after what he described as threats to his life from Mr Nazdratenko's clique unless he surrendered his stake in a local shipping company.

Now, at least for the time being, Mr Nazdratenko has gone and few will shed any tears for his passing. But he did not jump. He was pushed - by Mr Putin. Armed with its dossier, the Kremlin was threatening to launch a criminal investigation against Mr Nazdratenko unless he went. Conveniently, a new law has just come into force enabling Mr Putin to suspend any elected regional governor who is being investigated for criminal misdeeds.

Mr Chubais could be next in line as Mr Putin signalled when he also blamed the management of the electricity utility for the blackouts, though Moscow commentators expect his deputies rather than Mr Chubais himself to carry the can.

But if Mr Putin is winning his cold war, the people of the far east are still freezing.